John Baldessari was a conceptual artist who produced a ride range of work in various mediums up until his death in early 2020. He is best known for putting dots on faces. This started as an experiment with price stickers in 1985 and eventually evolved into painted dots and other shapes obscuring the face.
If you don't know him from the dots, you might know him from his word paintings. These large canvases are painted with statements Baldessari had read and, he would hire a sign painter to do the lettering for him. For that reason, his word paintings are polarizing. He didn't even paint them; how is that art? It's important to remember that Baldessari was a conceptual artist, and as such the idea is more important than the implementation. Personally, I think these pieces are really strong conceptual works.
Baldessari started out as a painter, but as painting became less popular throughout the 60s and 70s he shifted into creating conceptual works. In 1970, he took all of his paintings from 1953-1966 and burned them. He collected the ashes into a book shaped urn and called it Cremation Project. This was a physical representation of the shift in his work.
Baldessari experimented with a variety of media in his career following Cremation Project. While he mostly stuck to film and photography, he also created sculptures and installation work. He became a popular name in the contemporary art scene and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Obama in 2014. Outside of his art practice, he worked as a professor. He taught at Cal Arts early on in his career before taking a position at the School of Arts and Architecture in UCLA.
If you want to learn more about John Baldessari, this is an excellent short film about the artist. I found it really inspiring to see his work space and bookshelves.
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